"Listen. A deputy marshal may call on any citizen to aid him in executing his duty. Any citizen. The statute doesn't say man. I can't stand up. I can't ride. I'm summoning you, Iona MacRae, here before witnesses, to aid me in the arrest of the men in that canyon. Asa's soldiers can keep you alive. But the hand that holds the law out there has to be a civilian hand." He fumbled at her pocket, at the button, and could not undo it; she undid it for him and took the star out and laid it in his palm. He closed his fingers over it, then opened them and put it back in hers.
"I don't know the words," Iona said.
"You're a schoolteacher. You'll learn them on the way down."
Asa had turned away. He was looking east, toward the rim of the canyon, where the first edge of the sun was beginning to burn.
"Dunne," he said. "You'll stay here with the marshal. Keep him in the shade and keep him drinking. If anything but us comes over that rise, fire three shots and get him into the rocks." He turned back. His face was what it had been at the gate, closed and level, but his voice was not. "Iona. You'll stay behind Nalté. You'll go where he goes and stop where he stops. If he tells you to lie flat in the dirt, you'll do it, and you won't argue with him, because he's the only one of us who knows that canyon."
"I know it too," said Klemm. Then, after a moment: "Not like him."
VII.
Cañon Quemado had been named by Mexican freighters for the black volcanic rock of its walls, which held the heat of the day long into the night and gave it back in the morning as a kind of breath. From the south rim, lying flat among the creosote with her chin on her folded hands, Iona could see the whole of its upper end: the narrow throat where the old road came in from the east, the sandy floor, the stand of cottonwoods yellowing around the spring, and under the cottonwoods, the camp.
It was exactly as Nalté had said. That was the first thing that struck her, and it struck her harder than fear did. Every single thing was as he had said.
Two freight wagons with their tongues down. A string of horses on a picket line. A dozen men moving about in the cold early light, and the nearest of them was sitting on an upturned crate with a tin mirror propped against a wagon wheel, painting his face. He did it carefully, with two fingers, a band of lampblack across the eyes and a stripe of red clay down each cheek, the way a man might shave. Another was tying lengths of black horsehair into a hat so they would hang down like braids. A third sat with a bundle of arrows across his knees, rubbing dirt into the new shafts to make them look old.
Beside her, Klemm made a sound. It was not a word.
She looked at him. He was lying on his belly in the scrub with his carbine beside him, staring down into the canyon, and his swollen face had gone from red to the color of tallow. His lips moved.
"That one," he said, very low. "With the arrows. I know him. He sold us hay at Camp Verde. Name's Purcell." He swallowed. "God almighty. God almighty."
Nalté, on her other side, said nothing at all. He did not need to.